Blurring Boundaries: How Writing Slash Fanfiction Empowers Young Women in Mainland China

Abstract

This study pays close attention to Chinese slash fanfiction amateur female writers and their writing experiences. This research investigates in what kind of ways their writing experiences relate to a sense of female empowerment. The analysis emphasizes how slash writing as a seemingly individual and private experience connects itself to a larger community of writers and readers, and how this practice extends to the lived realities of gender and sexuality in mainland China. Using qualitative data from epistolary interviews with ten Chinese female slash writers, this study argues that writing slash fanfiction in mainland China is a boundary-blurring art. Through crossing and obscuring boundaries between private and public, fantasies and reality, individual and community, Chinese female slash writers retrieve a sense of agency and empowerment in their experiences of writing slash fanfiction through exploring affective experiences, reconciling with sexual fantasies, and serving and participating in a female community.